I was on the Hugh Hewitt national radio show a few nights ago talking about Pinterest. Hugh talks about all kinds of subjects but he is also interested in the entire new media craze. He had published a book way back in 2005, “Blog : Understanding the Information Reformation That’s Changing Your World”. In this book he correctly prophesized about blogging and how it would change the news and media landscape. Then after being influence by Blogworld CEO Rick Calvert he caught onto the twitter craze. He was an early adapter and uses it to great impact.

Now he is onto Pinterest and he thinks it will have a seismic impact on media again.

So after being on the show I got to thinking how important Pinterest will be for both media and business. Pinterest is already having incredible impact so how do you use that influence for your business. My goal today is to attempt to answer that question.

How to Use Pinterest for Your Business Brand

“Pinterest is like your own museum, you are the curator and you need to gather interesting content.”

All online business is all about driving traffic to your website, building brand recognition and converting new visits to leads or a buying client. So the question is, how do you do that with Pinterest? It is all about building a loyal followership with great content and fun activities for people to do.

First and foremost, you must become a thought leader

Become the must see Pinterest account for pins about a certain subject or topic relating to your industry. For example, because OxRun is a Web Development and Marketing company, we could create a pinboard that features awesome visual examples of great Online Marketing or Social Media Marketing. Or if you’re a bike company, you could create an incredible pinboard that features bike race events that you sponsor or all the great bike teams that use your shop. You would also include example of all the great bike adventures around the country or around the world. The possibilities are quite limitless.

By enabling other users to contribute their own pins to your pinboards, you open up a great opportunity to involve fans and customers in your marketing. Pick out a few of your top evangelists or customers, and create a board dedicated to their pins.

They feel special and included to be part of this board. And then they become extra excited about what you do and your brand. It is even ok to ask friends and customers to pin images that showcase the lifestyle they enjoy because of your products or brand.

You Must Show Visual Content

Pinterest is a hyper visual/eye candy social network, so you will need to create a pinboard that highlights some of your best visual content.

Many big brands are taking notice of the power of online visual content for marketing and the emotions images elicit in readers. Instagram is one platform that has contributed to this movement and enabled real businesses to leverage photos as an inbound marketing mechanism. Great examples of companies doing this are Starbucks, Red Bull, Ford etc.

The biggest challenge for some B2B companies wanting to use Pinterest as a marketing channel is a lack of visual content. By nature, many B2B companies are selling a product or service in an industry that most likely isn’t visual. This is where it is so important to get creative.

Here are some ideas of visual content you can post:

Pictures about the process of making your product – Believe it or not, these images can tell great emotional stories. Pin them and add great descriptions to the images to really let people in on the context of the image. Remember, people love real.

Pictures of success stories of people using your products – Nothing breads success like success. Showing pictures of success helps people to understand that you can help them be successful also. This is a great way to start building a trust relationship.

Picture of Chart and Graphs of success – These types of pictures are called Infographics. They are crazy popular right now. Do a quick search and Pinterest and you will get an idea of how popular they are.

If you have any industry data that you can visualize, do so before someone beats you to it. Then you will get pinned over and over again.

Pictures of your product evolving – People love history. You can post and entire board of the history of your product or the sales material for your product. People love this kind of thing and it is great for building a sense of longevity or perpetuity in your company. This is another great way to build trust.

Get an Understanding of Your Clients

Use Pinterest as a tool for understanding the interests and needs of your perfect customers. View pinboards of your customers to aid in your understanding of who your customers are and what they’re interested in.

If you have an integrated marketing software that tracks which people got to your website through Pinterest and follows them through the buying cycle, you can spot trends in their behavior and find ways to nurture such leads more successfully. OxRun can help you track and connect these referrals to lead data and can tell you what offer pinners converted on. From here, you can email your brand new leads and push them down the sales funnel with a custom message.

Add Links in the Descriptions of Your Pins

Whenever possible, include links back to your website and landing pages in your pins to drive traffic back to your website. Keep track of referral traffic and leads generated from Pinterest. Such insights will inform you about how useful this platform is in comparison to your other efforts.

To increase the likelihood of driving more traffic to your website, add a link back to the page on your website where that image lives for every pin. If you are uploading a photo instead of pinning something live on your website, select a link that makes sense and include that in the pin description. The combined impact from each pin’s clicks and re-pins will give you a big advantage.

Use Videos Generously

Pinners aren’t only limited to pinning images; they can pin videos, too! Create a pinboard of some of the interesting videos your business produces interspersed with relevant images.

I love videos of the creative process. A video that explains what you do in an understandable and warm way can attract many views and loyal customers.

Do you have executives that are very well know or do a lot of speaking at industry conferences and events? Create a pinboard that features videos of your speakers.

Pinterest’s homepage has a separate tab for videos, so you will get even more exposure by being featured in that category. Don’t forget to include the all important call to action within the video itself. Tell your viewers what you want them to do next to further engage with your company.

The All Important Hashtags

Just like Google+, Twitter and others, Pinterest supports the usage of hashtags. Users can use hashtags to tag their pins and make their content more search-friendly. Promoting a new campaign of some sort? Create a pinboard around it, and tag it with a hashtag you’re also using on Twitter and Google+ to leverage an integrated, cross-channel campaign.

If you have incredible offline events or if you are participating in some, create a pinboard that features the best photos and video footage of the event to help you generate buzz and promote the next one.

For instance, RedBull created a “Festibull” board that features a lot of pictures from the event . I must say, Red Bull has an incredible marketing team.

If you would like some assistance with building your best brand on Pinterest, Contact Us and we would be happy to help. And above all, keep pinning!

About Wayne Moran

Wayne Moran brings 20+ years of corporate IT and consulting experience developing large and small business systems for individual companies and software vendors. He has been providing Social Media services including teaching, blogging, tweeting, flickring etc producing on online brand of WaynePhotoGuy, Wayne Moran Photography and helping others build their professional online brand. Wayne’s passion is in building online communities. He is an award winning professional photographer and artist that has been published many times and sells images to many corporate clients.
Connect with Wayne on LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter.